infoTECH Feature

The software-defined storage (SDS) and software-defined data center (SDDC) markets are growing by leaps and bounds as organizations look for more cost effective and efficient ways to store ever increasing amounts of data.

In fact, MarketsandMarkets estimates the market will reach $5.41 billion by 2018, leaping from about $396.1 million in 2013. That growth will be driven by telecom service providers as well as cloud service providers, who are looking for more flexible and scalable storage solutions.

SDS company DataCore specializes in storage virtualization software designed to help customers seamless manage and scale their data storage architectures. The company is continuously trying to improve their offerings based on customer demands and needs, and recently conducted its fourth consecutive annual survey on storage challenges and demand for SDS.

The company has released its State of Software-Defined Storage report, which finds that a majority of organizations turned to SDS to better protect their investments, reduce disruptions, simplify management and future-proof their infrastructures. Nearly half of DataCore’s survey respondents reported difficulties with migrating between various models and generations of storage devices and were seeking simplified solutions that could also reduce their costs.

According to George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore, SDS is designed specifically to help organizations pool their available storage assets. He added that it also enables users to manage end-to-end storage as well as easily add storage assets to their existing storage architectures. This ultimately helps them to increase productivity and reduce their costs.

The DataCore survey found that 39 percent of respondents don’t encounter issues or concerns with managing different models and manufacturers of storage devices since independent storage virtualization software enables them to manage components centrally. Other interesting findings include 63 percent of respondents reporting they have less than 10 percent of capacity assigned to flash storage, while nearly 40 percent were not planning to use flash or SSD for server virtualization because of costs.

Performance degradation as well as an inability to meet performance expectations were concerns for 32 percent of survey respondents when virtualizing their server workloads. That group reported those concerns as “somewhat” of an obstacle to virtualization, while 23 percent of those queried considered them a “serious” obstacle.

For a majority of companies deploying storage virtualization software, improving disaster recovery and business continuity practices was a big motivator. Of those queried, 32 percent said this was the main reason for deploying SDS solutions while 30 percent reported they were looking to enable storage capacity expansion without disruption.